Learning To Love Yourself With Sarah Blondin

Sarah Blondin is the founder, writer, videographer and podcast host for ‘Live Awake’. Her beautiful meditations can be found here on Insight Timer.

Transcript

Hello, I'm Rod Janss and you're listening to FuelRadio. Com, A show about transformations. Hi, Sarah. Thanks for joining me on Fuel Radio. Great to be here, Rod. Thanks for having me. Sarah is, What would you call yourself? Are you the owner, You're the developer of this wonderful project called Live Awake? Do you have a title for yourself? Oh man. I guess you could call it, I'm just the writer. I'm the vessel. Trying to be at least, Yeah. Yeah. Well, It's very cool. I just, In our pre-interview chat, I told Sarah how I discovered her podcast. I've been on this quest to become a more loving person and I discovered this one podcast about loving yourself. And it was just what I needed at the time and I've been returning to it several times, Almost weekly, Listening to it. Again, It's just been a real kind of regular, It's become a regular sort of meditation for me. So yeah, Really cool. Thanks for doing that. Let's just talk about yourself a little bit. I know that you're a mom, Just describe your sort of regular real life. My job? Yeah. My regular real life. Well, I'm a full-time mother. I have a six month old named Hugo and a three year old named Leo. So I'm pretty much in the thick of motherhood right now. Writing is probably my biggest go-to safety. Get out of mom jail. It's just my children have really taught me how to uncover a lot of things about myself and probably are largely the reason Live Awake was born and where it was born from. I started Live Awake soon after or my first son was born so close to three years ago now. And when I got pregnant with Leo, I was living in Gastown, Vancouver. So I was very much in the hub of things and it was a very hard place for me to live in because I couldn't hear myself. And something happened when I got pregnant. All of a sudden, As a woman, You get very fierce in what you need and these kind of animal instincts come out in you. And the biggest kind of screaming advice was to get out of the city. And it was always a plan for my husband and I to eventually leave. But you know, Things are comfortable in your life and change is always kind of, You know, The upheaval is hard. But I just got extremely fierce about it and needed clarity. So we rented a small house in Summerland, BC, Where we were basically living in orchards. So it was very idyllic and peaceful. But with that came tumbleweed rolling down my street. I mean, It was a very stark contrast from Gastown, Vancouver. So I was dealing with absolute silence and no support network other than my husband. So I had left my friends, You know, All the people that were kind of, You know, Supporting me in my journey. And I was now alone in the quiet of nature. And I suffered a huge egoic breakdown, You could say, Because I had to face so many towering beliefs about myself in the quiet. And that's what solitude, I think that's what we're ultimately afraid of with solitude, Is that with that we have nowhere to run to. And that can mean a whole bunch of things. And for me, That was a facing of, I guess, A lot of belief structures that weren't really serving me. The biggest one was kind of why am I choosing a life that retired people choose? You know, I was really angry because I had all these visions for my life on a level of, You know, Getting out there and being in the world and I had been acting and I really wanted to be connected in that way. And life was showing me another way life was saying, Be quiet, Be still. And I was kind of angry about that. Really angry. So I kind of went into, I guess, I would call it a psychotic breakdown. And it was very, Very challenging place to be in because you can't get out and you can't escape to your normal coffee shops or friends or outlets. So I escaped into my writing. And what happened with my writing was every kind of struggle that I hit, So every wall that I hit, I would start to write. So a lot of my episodes are on accepting change and surrender and kind of visiting the dark and the light, You know, The vacillating between the two. And I found that everything I went to digest in my writing, At the end of about around page three of my, There was this beautiful message that just came like a gift. And it was so supportive and encouraging and loving. And I realized I had kind of accessed my own inner God, You could call it, That was saying, You're okay, You're doing well. And it was kind of transforming my experience. So I took all of essentially what are my journal entries and I thought, Wow, If I'm going through all this, I can guarantee others are, And I'm just going to try and do it for fun and just see what happens. So I started recording them and then somebody said, Well, Why don't, I feel like you have the perfect guided meditation voice, Maybe you should add a meditation at the end. So it kind of snowballed pretty organically into these guided meditations called the awake. So essentially they're my personal journal entries and I think that's why people are resonating with them because it's from a very real and human place of suffering and discovery and coming back to wholeness, I guess you could say. I want to go back a little bit. I want to go back to a few things. On the On Being podcast, They always ask, What was your religious upbringing like? And because you're providing these meditations and in a way it's kind of a spiritual teaching, I'm curious just what was your own religious background like as you were growing up? I was raised Catholic, I guess, But I don't remember much of that. My dad was a pastor though. So I was raised in, I guess you could say a fairly religious household, But not in the sense. He was kind of, I don't know, I don't actually know. My dad was kind of like a black sheep pastor, I guess you could call it. I don't know how to explain it. He's kind of preaches heaven or hell is now not something we get to. So he kind of broke the rules a little bit as far as that went. And I was asked at around 15 years old if I wanted to keep going to church and I chose not to. So I kind of broke off from that, Not in a resentful way as far as I can remember, But I just chose not to. But I've always been encouraged by both my parents to look deeper into reasons for things being the way they are and trying to always access the light of a situation. So in one way or another, I was always encouraged to look within, I guess you could say. Instead of turning away, I was told to turn inward. So I was raised Catholic, I guess. To do what you've done, You have to be really open to that inner signal and then it takes a lot of courage to follow it. Because I think we all have these longings, Desires, Things that pop into our minds that we think, Is that really the signal? Is that God? Is that something I should follow? Were there some significant markers along the way? Because I think sometimes people look at what people who make them kind of moves that you make and they go, Oh, Wow. They maybe assume that you received this message and you just did it. But were there some things, What led up to that? Were there some things along the way that you learned to trust your inner voice? I would say the biggest thing was years of not listening to it. I like that answer. There was when I was living in Vancouver, I had just moved away from, I'm originally from Winnipeg, Manitoba. So I left again, My support network. I was in a new city. I was trying to figure things out. I was acting. I was doing some, I had graduated with journalism and I was doing some broadcast journalism. I thought that's where I wanted to go. And I was always in pain at the end of some of my biggest success, Like booking a broadcasting job or booking an acting job. I always felt this really deep emptiness that accompanied it. And I kept saying, Well, I should be happy. This is great success. Why am I not happy? And there was always something that kept saying, There's something deeper. There's something deeper. I wasn't okay with living on the surface, I guess you could say. And I felt those things really just led me to live on the surface and it came really easy to me. But it also created a lot of angst, I guess. So for years, I struggled through trying to be of service, But not knowing how. And that was a really painful several years of not feeling like I was contributing in a meaningful way to the world. So I guess through being in that place of suffering, I did end up praying a lot, Not to God specifically, But to something to be revealed, Because I wanted to be of service in a deeper way. So being in a condensed, Painful place all the time and feeling like you're always on the ground, You kind of as soon as wisdom or some other sign comes from somewhere else, You kind of jump at it out of desperation, I guess. So out of my desperation, I kind of slowly started hearing, You know, Just they were never blatant. It wasn't like Sarah started a podcast and start writing and touching people that way. It was never blatant. It was always tiny things. Stick to your writing, Go into nature, Find quiet. And from listening to those quiet things, I think we always expect it to be a very monumentous voice that says, This is what you're doing, When it really is usually just a culmination of tiny little whispers that you listen to. And the more you listen to those whispers, The more you say, Okay, You want me to go to the forest, I'll go to the forest. Something gets confirmed in your system and something gets aligned and you start developing a trusting relationship with these whispers. And I find the more you trust and the more you just say, Okay, Even if it's random, Like stick your feet in the sand, Take your shoes off. You know, These are very simple things, But you start developing a trusting relationship with something that's being spoken inside of you. And the more you do it, The more they come, The louder it comes, And the more you just start saying yes to it, No matter what it says. And then it just kind of starts moving faster and more open and you just become more aligned with yourself because that's ultimately what's speaking to you is your deeper self. So for me, It was a lot of suffering, Out of desperation, Listening to some deeper something and then it just snowballed from there, I guess you could say. Over years though, It wasn't quick. One of the questions I had written down and you've answered it, I think is, How do you come up with these beautiful podcasts? It sounds like they come out of your life and they come out of your writing and stuff like that. Like you said, That is a way that you process your feelings. Tell us just a little bit, Let's get a little bit practical. Let's say you're. . . Like for your next podcast, Do you have like a schedule? Are you just waiting for inspiration? Okay, So this is the tricky thing with my podcast. I've had writer friends say, Well, No, You just have to sit down and write because I've gone through large periods of non-doing and non-listening and non-being able to hear. I think that's a natural part of the process for me. So it's not like you sit down and go to the grind. For me, I've always written. It's always been my mode of digesting an experience doesn't really come to an end for me until I've written it down. It's kind of like the resting place for me. But with that, Whatever I've written about in my podcast, There's a very close connection for me. So self-love, For example, That you really resonated with was a very hard thing for me to learn as well. And I'm still learning. Like that wasn't long ago that I even posted that one. So I guess what happens is I kind of hear these words swirling around about self-love. It starts coming to me through different places and then I do kind of an internal digesting. And then all of a sudden, Something just says, Write. And it just floods out. So I've written most of my podcasts within 10 minutes. But it has to reach kind of a point of digestion in my life before I can write about it. Exactly. It germinates for a while. And then I'm almost looking for everything to start showing me it. And then all of a sudden, It just gets clear. And then I go, Bleh. And then it's there for everyone to read or listen to. This message of being okay, I like that. That's also a recurring message for me too. Can you tell us a little bit more about that? I'll tell you, I'll share with you just a brief experience that I've had. Good. I mentioned Tara Brock before in our pre-interview conversation. And she does this thing where you envision your future self and what would your future self say to you in certain situations or different things that you're feeling. She does these guided meditations and it's usually something like dealing with a difficult person in your life or something like that. And so anyways, My future self has, When I've done these meditations a couple of times, Has said to me, It's going to be okay and you're okay. And you know how these things work. As soon as you hear that, It's like your life flashes before your eyes. And actually, The last time this happened, I was thinking of a person who I'm having a difficult time with and they make me feel like I'm not okay. I don't measure up and I feel like I've never measured up in this person's eyes and I feel like I've kind of given up hope. Yeah, I get that. It's never going to happen. But you keep trying, Don't you Rod? Well, It's quite something for my future self to say that. And then now it's like, Okay, Now I have a tool. Every time I think of that person, I think it's going to be okay and I'm okay. Or if there's something else in my life that brings up a similar feeling that that person emotes in me, I can practice that really quickly too and just rest in that. I think this being okay is unconditional love. What was that, If you don't mind sharing, What was that experience like for you? It sounds like it was really a pivotal message or experience in your life. I think I was fighting and resisting everything so much so that I just hit rock bottom. When you hit rock bottom, Something really beautiful happens. All of your defenses are down. Your ego is maimed. You're really just receptive and the earth is an extremely good place to lie down. I think when people hit the ground and they think this is a place of great despair, It's really not. I think it's when you're probably in your most open, Receptive self because you've just let everything go. And then something speaks to you and I think that's your higher self that you're speaking of, Your future self so to speak. We all know about having those types of experiences. I love thinking about when my son was first born and how I was literally in panic and shock for a good six months I would say. And then he was a year old and I look back at it and I can't even remember the panic and shock. So there's a part of you that knows eventually I'm going to look back at this experience and be okay and not even have a response to it. So how can I access that okayness now if this is all going to be a memory at some point? You might not be able to even remember this conflict you have with said person you're speaking about in the future. So how can we access that now because that's the ultimate truth. That's what I always try and practice is this is eventually going to be a memory. Why am I giving it so much power now and why am I letting it kind of control my peace and my pleasure for life because eventually it's all just going to be okay. And it already is okay. It's just the story that we tell about it that gives it power and makes it not okay. If that makes sense. I don't know if I'm being too vague here but. I'm tracking with you. Okay good. I hope. It's a practice for me too. Yeah. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. It's a continual practice. You've mentioned suffering along the way. It's not all this journey of listening to the inner signal is not all just a journey of bliss unfortunately. There is lots of bliss right? You mentioned silence and enjoying nature and I believe beauty for me equals joy. So the outdoor seeing things outside and beautiful things just brings incredible joy to me. Can you say where does suffering fit into it for you? Because I hear in your story that there's been some real pain along the way as well. Is that just life? Yeah, That's the thing. I guess because if somebody saw my life from the outside they'd say what she got to complain about and on the grand scale of things I have no real massive hardship but I think suffering and bliss are almost totally connected. They're hand in hand. So I don't think we can have one without the other. Thich Nhat Hanh, I don't know if you've ever heard of him. He's a great poet. He says if he had a child and somebody said your child could be born into a world there was no suffering, Would you want that? He said absolutely not because the suffering is the part, It's just as much the bliss as it is the suffering. I don't mean suffering like pain. Suffering to me is just a disharmony with my higher self. So on a level I'm in constant suffering. Well you know we're always kind of battling to come back to center and that to me is suffering because I don't like living in the untruth of who I am. That's really hard for me. And because I know there is two of me that creates suffering because every time I choose to be in my suffering self I know there's a higher self that I'm not choosing, Right? So that creates a disharmony and a suffering within me. So every time I choose to fight my husband or every time I choose to yell at my son I know that's creating suffering for me because I'm aware of a higher part of me that would not be doing these things. And it kind of goes hand in hand with awareness doesn't it? I like what you say. Totally. It's the untrue. I love that how you phrased that. I don't like living with what's untrue about me. Yeah, No. That's what creates the suffering, Right? And I think we all know that. I think we all know when we start engaging with the untruth and I think that can be pretty painful and because I've tended to this self and I pay careful attention I think I'm hyper aware of when I do slip or when I do fall. So the suffering gets magnified. But no, There hasn't been any major moments of suffering. I haven't been addicted to anything and I haven't had to go through stuff like that. But on a level we're all suffering. There's no difference in any one of us. So maybe I'm just more in touch with it. You mentioned Thich Nhat Hanh. Who are some of your teachers? Who are people that you read or listen to? Thich Nhat Hanh is definitely one of them. I don't know what that man has done but every time I hear his voice it's just like, Whoa, You're just done. Clarissa Pinkola Estes is one of my favorites. She's not like in mainstream I guess. Yeah, I haven't heard of her. I'll have to look her up. She wrote a book. It's essentially my Bible called Women Who Run With The Wolves and it's just a really powerful. . . Just check her out. She's cool. Who else do I love? I love everything Tammy Simmons does from Sounds True. I guess I go through. . . Go through phases, Hey? I go through phases. Yeah, I do too. And Tara Brach is really awesome too. She's light and fun. I'm in a Tara Brach phase right now. Yeah, She's cool. And she's really nurturing. I love that mix of science and psychology though too that she has and then the Buddhist background that she has as well. Yeah, It's really grounded. And like you say, The jokes, Her bad jokes during her time. Yeah, That's the thing, Right? I love that. You always know a really great spiritual teacher when they have so much light too. They're not just trying to sermonize anything to you. They're just like, Ah! Thich Nhat Hanh laughs all the time and some of the. . . They're just laughing and smiling all the time because they've accessed the lightness of life I think. As we begin to wrap up, I just have a couple more questions and just. . . This is maybe kind of a heavy one, But. . . Do it, Do it, I'm there. All right. What does it mean to you to live awake? That's just a big one, Rod. I think to live awake means to be wholly responsible for the healing of your life. So what does that mean to me? It means just constantly choosing love over anger, Over fighting, Over resistance, I guess, On a day-to-day basis and not looking to others to kind of give you permission to do that or ask you to do that. I think a lot of the time, And at least for me, I waited for a very long time for someone outside of me to show me what I needed to do, But what actually was needing to happen was for me just to start saying yes to what I was already knowing, Which were the small voices like I was talking about going to the forest or just taking responsibility and yeah, Choosing love in the face of your discomfort because that's the higher path, I guess. So that's living awake, Just being aware and not. . . Does that make sense? I think a big. . . If you want to say it this way, A big part of my awakening was starting to just pray outside and in my evangelical religious surroundings, Nobody had any advice for me. I was actually considered to be kind of dangerous, Right? But I kept going and like you say, Not asking people for permission. Yeah, For me, It's led to a deeper awareness and love for God and for others. And now, Like I say, The thing I think I'm having to work on is more love for myself. Oh, That's the hardest one. I don't know what it is. It's not even taught to us. I wish it was taught from day one. Yes, Yes. I thought that. Why didn't anybody teach me this? We tell our kids, Just be kind and love everyone. Nobody says and also yourself. It was such a vague notion for me. It was almost something I dismissed, Self-love. It was something I dismissed. People would say, Love yourself. I'd say, What? Okay, Blah, Blah, Blah, Whatever. It wasn't even something I thought had value on a level. Do you know what I mean? I was so disconnected from that. And I think the self-love thing for me happened. I don't know what someone told me or someone just kept saying, I love you, I love you and asking me to repeat that. And I did that in my podcast and I just broke because it was almost as if I'm turning 34 this month and it was like 34 years of never saying that to myself. Isn't that bizarre? The way I thought of it and again, With my own religious upbringing is we hear the verse, Love the Lord your God with all your heart, Mind and soul and others as yourself. But as yourself is kind of the afterthought. But really, And this isn't original with me at all, Is how can you love others or even love God unless you love yourself? If you don't love yourself, You're not going to be able to do those other things. Isn't that wild? And now we're just finally deducting that. But that's the beauty of the spiritual journey because I think that's what it all, Everything leads to that. You realize your pain with your spouse or your children is usually translated into some sort of pain you're not addressing in yourself. Totally. And that's where it started for me was just pain with my spouse. I know I want to love her more, But I couldn't because I realized that it was my own thing. I wasn't loving myself enough first. Yeah, And that's how I first discovered that after I had fully given myself a really good love down, Maybe my first one ever, Just saying I love you till I cried. And I walked out into the kitchen and my husband just grabbed me and held me so close and said, I don't know what you've done this morning, But you feel so beautiful. My energy felt beautiful. He had immediately kind of sensed a change in language in my body, I guess. And that transformed what, You know, He gave me more love because of that. And that to me was my aha, Okay. So the more work I do on myself, The more I'm wholly responsible for the healing of my life and myself. The more I'm living awake to all of the ways that I am being incongruent with that, The more the world will start mirroring to me the immense love that I'm creating inside myself. Like that's the plain truth. And that may in fact be the journey. You're doing the good work, Rod. You are too. Thanks. The hard work, But it's the good work. So also in our pre-interview, We talked about, I warned you that I was going to ask you where this project was going and you don't really know, But now you've had about 30 minutes to think about it. But you probably haven't been thinking about it. I have not. I've been so engaged, Rod. It sounds like you're just intuitively going along and where it goes, It goes. Exactly. I'm going to continue writing. I felt a little bit of a nagging to take it somewhere else, So I'm not sure. It may look more like a program. I think that's what I might work on. I've been toying with the idea of a program that helps connect us back with our feeling bodies because I think that's what we're so disconnected from. So I think we come in to the earth, Into form, Into body as little babies and we kind of brace against life because it's so big and we don't know what we're doing and it's a way of managing things and we're just not taught to open back up again. So I think I might want to do a little program on that. I love that. I was going to ask, That was one of my questions. I was wondering if you were teaching anyone or spending time with people because I'm sure you have an amazing presence and I wonder if you were coaching or directing people. It's percolating. It's slowly happening. It's so funny. I don't know where you found my podcast, But Insight Timer is an app. It was on Insight Timer. Since then, It's just like exponential growth as far as my reach and it's been really beautiful because there's people all over the world. It's now a few of my episodes are being translated into three different languages. So that's really cool. Oh, But I went to my mailbox and I live like secluded. Like I'm up on, I have a hundred acres in Sam and I'm up on a hill and I barely see anyone but my male lady and my kids and I go down to the mailbox and she says, I was at a massage the other day and someone kept talking about this little wake meditations and I Googled it and I saw that it was you. So it's even started to hit Sam and I'm. So we'll see where it goes. We'll see. How does that make you feel when it comes full, Full all the way around like that? Yeah. Pretty, You know, It's shocking. It's like, Whoa, What? I mean, Because it's just bizarre. It's just, It was my own personal work that's touching a lot of people, Which I'm very grateful for. We're all so connected. I mean, The suffering we're talking about is so universal. Basically there is no difference. So I'm just saying it out loud, I guess. Well, I've got you. I got to ask you this question too. Like what's a typical day in your life like? Like how are you guys sustaining yourself? Did your husband, It sounds like you both would have had to have left the work that you were doing. How are you surviving? That's a good question. Barely. No, No. My husband is, He's a developer and he owns a restaurant Whistler actually. So he's kind of, But he's originally a ranch boy from Merritt. So he's always had a desire to be out in nature. So we've kind of just made it possible to do this. But I mean, We're always problem solving and trying to figure out new ways. But I am just a mother. I mean, I am a mother, Not just a mother. But we're finding, I mean, We're trying to figure it out. Day to day is just me and my boys really writing when I can. Yeah. Well, I really have the sense that this is going somewhere. Not that it has to, But I'm sure you're going to have more people knocking on your door and asking you to do things. And you really have a gift. You have a gift of writing and I'm glad someone told you that you have a very meditative voice because I think that's a, Well, I think it's important. Like it's helpful if people are trying to meditate. I think sometimes when they're doing guided meditations, The voice can kind of get in the way, But yours doesn't. Your voice really. Oh, Thank you. You've got it. You've got a natural. It's just there. You've got a natural gift there. Yeah, It's awesome. Yeah, Voice is a big thing. So. Thank you so much for joining me. And what's the best way for people to, What's the URL again for LiveAway? It's the Live Awake. I think it's, Whoa, Rob, Is it the Live Awake Project? Here, I've got it. Oh, I just closed. I think it's liveawakeproject. Com and there you'll find my SoundCloud and my iTunes link and all that. So you can subscribe through iTunes and SoundCloud and YouTube, I think. There's some videos on Vimeo that I just do for fun. So. Yeah, Just to confirm that it's the liveawakeproject. Com and we'll put that in our show notes as well. And also, If you mentioned the Insight Timer, That's been a real blessing to me. And so if people want to look you up there, They can just search for Live Awake. Search Live Awake on Insight Timer. It's a great app if you're looking for all sorts of things. Yeah, We've mentioned Tara Brock in the course of this discussion today and she's on there as well. So yeah. Yeah, They've got Eckhart Tolle and lots of stuff. Tolle's not a big meditation guy, But he does. No, He's funny to listen to though. So he's just so cute. I love him. He's got one on acceptance that I listened to recently that's really good. Is it good? Yeah. He's, Yeah, You got to be in the mood for him, But he's great. Great messages. Yeah. He pokes fun at meditators trying to find a particular state and he just says, The state that we're all searching, The perfect state is acceptance. And he's laughing all the time. He does. He chuckles his way through the whole thing. He's just like, All his own jokes. It's so funny. I'm telling you, The sign of a good spiritual teacher is laughing. If they're laughing, Follow. Well, Thank you, Rod. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, Sarah. It was awesome. Yes. Thank you so much for joining me today. Yay. Thank you.

Reviews

Unbelievable
Thank you!.I have son name Leo
Love you!

Great insights. Without self love, we cannot love anything. If we don't love ourselves, we revert to our second self, an angry or frightened self that is not our genuine self.

This interview was great since I also have listened to a couple of Sarah's sessions here on Insight Timer. I have quite a few things in common with Sarah... YES! I kept saying. Keep creating, my light is stronger because you shined yours on this platform 💞

I enjoyed learning about Sarah and her process! Thank you for the lively conversation and solid questions!

Nice! Lots to think about and further research. I wish i had woken up at 34. Sadly i needed a few more decades but I'm getting there.